| > It is as rare as being 7 feet tall, sadly. Objectively not true? Not even close to true. I guarantee you there are many orders of magnitude more people in the world who understand recursion and that understand pointers than there are people who are 7 feet tall. Being 7 feet tall is extremely rare, and building a functioning C app is not. The average height of an NBA player at the highest level of the sport is under 7 feet. ---- I don't understand why we're all commenting under this thread accepting the premise that good programmers are rare. They're not, look at the size of the industry and the output. The only way this argument makes sense is if you redefine "good" to mean something incredibly exclusionary, and even if you do it's impossible to argue that none of the software coming out of the industry is producing any value for users or solving any problems that they have. > And without understanding indirection and recursion, the most you'll ever do is ...well..not much... How do you think we have a software industry at all if you're claiming that both: A) only an extreme minority of the population (<1 in a million) is capable of understanding very basic concepts like pointers, and also B) it's impossible to build useful tools without them. One of those two things has to be false, or you have to explain to me why the entire software industry hasn't collapsed by now from lack of talent and lack of output. |